For this project, AminoCat Entertainment needed a new and updated logo animation to put on their films. The studio wanted the output to be 4k, putting a foot forward in the UHD world.

The client originally did not have a solid idea on what they were looking for, so together we worked to find an appealing idea. Being a film studio, we of course needed to incorporate a film strip into the animation.

Intro film strip

Intro film strip

Start of film burn

Start of film burn

The film melting, stretching, and tearing

The film melting, stretching, and tearing

The film melting was a big challenge material-wise. I used a combination of bitmaps and procedural noise to drive a semi-physical heat/melting map. At the same time, I distorted the film strip’s polygons to warp and stretch as it melted away. For the logo underneath, I used an occlusion/dirt map to darken the edges of the hot glowing logo to emulate how hot metal cools faster at edges exposed areas.

Logo text being created

Logo text being created

Logo cooling and lighting fading in

Logo cooling and lighting fading in

Final logo settle

Final logo settle

Like most of my projects, I used 3DS Max to create the scene and OTOY’s Octane Render for rendering. Because GPU rendering’s main problem is noise, I use Neat Video, a great hardware accelerated denoising plugin that works on render noise and sensor noise alike. It’s saved me lots of hours of render refinement. You can see a comparison video I made here.